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Notes -
There’s so much there, and it’s so rich and dense with detail, but I find myself noting one thing in particular — every relationship dispute you describe there concentrates around sex.
Given that Lana has had fallings-out with both a man and a woman over sex, is it possible that she just has a very low sex drive, and believed this to be indicative of lesbianism even though it might actually mean she’s just not very sexual towards anyone? “Well that jerk only wanted one thing, and it’s disgusting.” “Well that hoe only wanted one thing, and it’s disgusting.”
Maybe she doesn’t really want to have sex with anyone, but attributed it to male perversion, or something, which the lesbian falling-out gives the lie to?
The suicidewatch subreddit has always struck me as weird, in that it expects incredibly specific behaviors from posters that are in line with the way suicide hotline call center workers are trained, but from anonymous redditors. I argue that this makes it strictly worse for the people who go there feeling hopeless — the median post gets almost no responses because the rules are so strict no one wants to reply, and the responses someone does get are very vague, non-specific, non-judgmental and therefore useless. There’s no authenticity in it. You might as well talk to ChatGPT.
When you say she’s (or was?) a “religious Protestant” — what do you mean by that? Because it strikes me as very odd that she would hold the views she did and be a member of an evangelical church. I know of feminist evangelicals in that mould, but I always think of them as people who are simply in the process of leaving, as Lana eventually did. I find it shocking that she wouldn’t be able to find a home in the mainline Protestant world, where her views are extremely common! And I wonder if perhaps the extremity of her behaviors reflects the zeal of an evangelical-to-agnostic convert, a type with which I am very familiar. But perhaps she was mainline, which would make this moot and frankly make her behavior and the opposition of the church (the mainlines couldn’t enforce sliced bread remaining sliced even if they tried) even more concerning.
A sad story. But I wonder if the object lesson is not so much about intolerance of dissent as it is about the characteristic Christian calling of humility: humility before morality, before duty, before other people, and ultimately before God. If tolerance comes from anywhere, it comes from understanding in humility that you may be wrong; and that others, in their humility, may also be. And that neither of you may — I say “may” here advisedly — be wicked and perverse for your error, but simply human.
It is not difficult to find evangelical or conservative Catholic women who identify as feminists in kind of a 90’s pop feminism way. They’re usually very sex negative, extremely concerned about domestic violence, big believers in women getting lots of education but also value stay at home moms(as long as she has at least a bachelor’s degree, of course), kinda uncomfortable with pro-choice ideas, thinks it’s important to go to church but not because God takes attendance, don’t like Trump but democrats at the very least make them uncomfortable, middle aged or older. Most of them even vote R.
That describes most of the teachers I had in catholic school. It’s not shocking that one in a failing marriage with a church community taking her husband’s side might spiral to the left.
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I honestly don't think it's weird at all. Except maybe in a sort of Tumblr-ish "weirdos online intuit where the culture will go" way.
A lot of the stuff around microaggressions, trigger warnings and pronouns essentially insist on turning first any employee in proximity and then the average person into a caregiver for those who are or claim to be fragile.
Atheists of a certain sort simply do not see humility in religion but the opposite so this point never lands with them. But it should raise an interesting question: Christians are tyrannical, know-it-all busybodies, how bad do the consequences of a lack of humility have to be that even their book warns against it?
Often, Christian emphasis on humility registers simply as a way to self-license to be as unhumble as one can be, as long as the arrogance can be rationalised as being in the service of Christianity (or more bluntly divorced from the meaning of words, something that amounts to "I am clearly more humble and therefore superior"). This pattern is by no means exclusive to it - consider the tropes associated with countries that have "Democratic" in their name, or the reactions of "tolerant" left-wingers when asked to tolerate something outside of the standard bag of things to be tolerated.
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Did she block naraburns over sex? Marriages falling apart is one thing, falling out with every friend you ever had is another. And when people in online support group are telling you you're the asshole... Ho boy...
I meant “relationship dispute” in terms of “dispute in a romantic relationship.”
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I only mean that she attended a "non-denominational" Christian (is that an oxymoron?) church in the area, but I couldn't tell you anything more specific about it than that. I probably knew the name of the congregation at some point, but I certainly don't remember it now. It's quite possible she was, as you say, "simply in the process of leaving," albeit very slowly (then all at once). From my limited perspective, the congregational falling-out seemed to be part and parcel with the divorce, but again--by then, most of my information on her circumstances was being filtered through the lens of social media posts.
Ah, that does mean evangelical. Almost universally, “non-denominational” means “Baptist in denial.” Sometimes with more charismatic influence than is typical of Baptists. It would be absolutely no surprise to me for a pro-choice feminist to have a falling out with such a congregation over gay marriage, as those congregations are typically conservative doctrinally even if they’re experimental liturgically and ecclesiologically. (And congregational autonomy isn’t even a strange idea for evangelicals.)
That also draws into relief why she felt her religion was either/or — one characteristic of many non-denominationals is a general ignorance of forms of Christianity outside the evangelical orbit, so the concept of an institutional Christianity that is somewhat, well, woke would be unfamiliar. That also makes her pathway more clear to me; she brought the non-denominational emphasis on spiritual autonomy, raw authenticity, and emotional intensity to her politics, with disastrous results.
Nondenominationals are theologically Baptist, but in practice strongly tend to be a bit more liberal than baptists are, not necessarily politically. Nondenominational churches near me run ministries for trial marriages, which baptists at the least would frown upon.
You’re right that virtually none of them are going to be OK with gay marriages. But this is probably more ‘how she chose to frame her disagreement with the church’ than the disagreement itself.
That's... weird. I've been out of the evangelical orbit for, woah, like 15 years at this point? So it wouldn't be surprising if the moral sands have shifted in ways like that in all that time.
I can testify, though, to the bare fact that moral drift in evangelicalism seems to have accelerated over that time, at least -- both my Baptist friends and my Pentecostal cousin are drinking (alcohol) now, and women in pastoral roles is becoming a commonplace belief and practice, even if the Southern Baptists are holding out for now. I also have a friend who was? is? an SBC deacon and had pre-marital sex with multiple women before his marriage, even after his entrance into ministry, because, to quote, "I don't feel convicted of it." (Is there a term for "perfect uncontrition?") He was always kind of a heartbreaker, though. Accusations of infidelity and sexual misconduct have followed him for a long time. So I don't exactly know he was going to let something as petty as "the moral commandments of the almighty God" get in the way of getting his dick wet.
This is indeed much more common than it used to be, and I think it’s a spiritually healthier place for the church to be. I have little knowledge of how it’s gone inside the holiness movement, though.
This is sort of true but in a weird way. There used to be more of a middle ground for evangelicals to combine a mostly theologically conservative outlook with gender egalitarianism. But that middle ground has eroded heavily, as the gender egalitarian types usually went liberal in other ways over time, to the point that this has become a kind of unconscious expectation. The delay for public figures to go from supporting women in ministry to deconstructing is now shockingly brief. I know some folks who still try to occupy that middle ground, but few of them are younger than Gen X.
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Baptists have always drank alcohol, even if they said they don’t. Remember the jokes- ‘Baptists? So rude, they won’t even say hi to you in the liquor store’ and ‘How do you keep a Baptist from drinking all your beer? Bring a second Baptist.’ Or even ‘Baptist church? Check the deacon’s office for beer.’
Sexual misconduct allegations of that sort aren't terribly unusual among baptists(or low church Protestantism generally), so it doesn’t surprise me, but even fairly liberal ones near me at least theoretically ban cohabitation. On the other hand it does seem like preacher’s wives have gone from Mrs pastor to copastor. Definitely have the impression that, liberalizing(slowly) though they might be, baptists are holding out dramatically better than nondenominationals.
I'm not familiar with those jokes. But my ultimate familial background is also in the holiness movement where not just the teaching but the strict expectation of avoiding alcohol was a point of repeated emphasis and "serious" sin results in loss of salvation -- often with the expectation of a public confession of sin as part of an altar call (the preferred term is "backsliding"). I reckon this background made me especially predisposed to the concepts of infused righteousness and sacramental confession, even if Wesleyan holiness tradition has a very different model of what "synergistic justification" looks like (and therefore finds no place for the veneration of saints as heroic). A famous quote from the Holiness movement is this, "The minimum of salvation is salvation from sinning. The maximum is salvation from pollution—the inclination to sin"; which is eerily Tridentine. So I suppose there's a little projection of my own that I'm doing, where I assume the historically strict behavior of my holiness family members is true of abstentionist Protestant movements more generally.
The sexual misconduct allegations had nothing to do with abuse of power or his work in the Baptist church, but were more informal, and are probably what I'd put in the bucket of "overreaction to a misunderstanding." If the exact terms of the accusations were discussed on the motte, they'd probably be laughed at. My larger point is simply to illustrate that this friend is... kind of a player, someone who seems very sociosexual, to the point where excessive sexuality seems to surround him. And to be fair, he does have bedroom eyes.
Maybe they’re Catholic jokes.
We also tell the joke ‘baptists only fornicate lying down so peeping toms don’t mistake them for dancing’. Applied holiness standards have been selective for a while.
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I'm not sure it's ignorance so much as disinterest. If she's in the process of abandoning Christian conviction anyway, why seek out a woke church instead of the woke secular friends she already has? In my experience exvangelical men and women usually end up atheist, with a minority of women falling into witchcraft instead.
A drift toward wokeness that maintains the form of Christianity is much more likely when it happens at the congregational level and up.
That's a fair point. But as someone who is, I suppose, a literal exvangelical according to the definition (if not the spirit) of the term, I agree that most conversions away from evangelicalism lead away from faith entirely (or toward performative paganism). But that actually goes to my point -- evangelicalism is so totalizing in its cultural orbit, so utterly identified with Christianity to many Americans, that rejecting it or its culture means rejecting Christianity. I speak from experience here: I knew profoundly little about non-evangelical churches when I left evangelicalism as a teen, except that Catholicism and mainline Protestantism theoretically existed, even if they seemed more like historical trivia than real religious bodies. Even Catholicism has long struck many white evangelicals from the Midwest and Southeast as something for elderly latinas, someone else's ethnic religion, a church for the still-pagan descendents of pagan Aztecs, a place for hyphenated-Americans. That tone has severely softened in recent years, as white Catholics have become the standard-bearers of the religious right in many ways, but there's a serious way in which the often harsh, but nevertheless informed critiques of more traditional forms of Christianity within historic Protestantism have been flanderized in evangelical circles to an absolute rejection of the Christianity of non-evangelical forms of faith -- indeed out of ignorance.
That said, evangelicalism has also been characterized by a firmer affirmation of conservative social doctrine than spiritual doctrine (I'm not saying spirituality isn't important to them -- I'm saying their emphasis, especially to people who grow distant, is often perceived to be culture war instead of spiritual development), and so leaving evangelicalism is often associated with leaving social conservatism. So most who proudly wear the title of "ex-evangelical" do so because they believe social liberalism is the One True Faith, and become evangelical atheists instead of evangelical Christians. Seen it many times; been there myself.
I also very much see cases of increasing non-denominational, doctrinally-loose and progressive churches that explicitly attract people like this; some Baptist friends of mine have a lesbian friend who attends such a church, which is growing. So there's clearly an appeal for a form of Christianity that basically reflects the worldview that Lana had before the breakup of her marriage, and I'm simply reflecting on the market failure where the mainline Protestant churches that have already been there for a long time now aren't even considered as an option, and are themselves being out-competed by "woke evangelical" churches the same way the megachurch is out-competing the Bible church on the street corner!
I had a somewhat different experience of the evangelical church growing up than you did, though I can see where you are coming from. I remain in the congregation where I grew up, a Baptist-adjacent Bible church in a blue state.
I’d say that our attitude toward Rome growing up was guarded, sometimes harsh, but not particularly uninformed; of course I have a deeper understanding of the critique as a middle-aged man than I did as a teenager, but that’s true of many things. We didn’t talk about the Eastern Orthodox much, but there weren’t a lot of them around. Our attitude toward middle- and even high-church Protestants was reasonably positive so long as they were strong on Scripture and held to sola fide.
I agree that the general evangelical attitude toward Rome is much less guarded today than it was. Opinions on Eastern Orthodoxy are pretty mixed, but the most common attitude is to regard them as eccentric Roman Catholics. (I will give you that this one is pretty uninformed.)
I can’t speak to your experience, but in mine people who leave evangelical Christianity tend to move toward social liberalism first, then when this clashes with evangelical Christianity they abandon evangelicalism. It’s a commonplace that when a young man comes to his pastor and says, “I just can’t accept the truth of Christianity any longer,” the correct response is, “Who is she?” Also common today are people who want to accommodate their friends on LGBT issues and leave their evangelical churches when those hold fast to the biblical teaching.
To those leaving it may look like the church is prioritizing social issues over spiritual things. But striving after obedience to God’s will revealed in Scripture is fundamentally tied up in spiritual things. (“If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” and, “Faith without works is dead.”) You can be socially conservative without being an evangelical Christian, or a Christian at all, but it’s no coincidence that socially liberal churches also have a low view of the Bible.
(There is a smaller cohort that leaves evangelicalism directly for more liturgical churches. This is a different phenomenon, and most of them don’t think that evangelicals’ positions on social issues are too conservative.)
I agree that this demand exists, but in my world it’s less than one might suppose. I expect that most “woke evangelical” churches will fade away in a generation or so as the children of their members abandon any connection to Christianity.
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